Shifting his focus, picking up the thread of his thoughts, Noble reached for his mouse and clicked on a folder with his notes. The interviews with the boyfriend, Kevin Tatum, and Jonas Seaver, manager of the Green Rolling Hills Inn, had been extensive. Both had agreed to be polygraphed, and both were found to be truthful.

They’re not considered suspects at this stage.

And Noble and other investigators certainly didn’t believe Samantha Moore ran off. They believed the argument she’d had with Tatum over their route and running out of gas had been resolved.

Noble clicked and again visited the state’s Missing Persons page, a map dotted with tiny male or female icons. They represented upward of 40 unsolved cases of people who’d vanished across Vermont. Some dated back to the 1940s.

He couldn’t bear to let Samantha Moore’s case, his case, become another icon on the map. Moreover, he couldn’t shake the specter of the Hydra case—its scope, its magnitude, its unspeakable depravity.

Could that be what’s at play with Moore?

Noble shook his head and revisited the chief theory that he and the other investigators adhered to. The mystery vehicle that had terrorized Moore’s stranded truck tracked her and her boyfriend to the Green Rolling Hills Inn in Spiritsburg. There, the kidnapper was lying in wait, ready to employ some sort of ruse. Moore’s abduction was premeditated.

Her abductor was hunting.

Noble clicked onto his photos of Moore and searched her eyes.

Are you still alive?

His phone rang.

“Noble, Major Crimes.”

“Detective Noble, this is Professor Constance Reeves, at Northwestern in Chicago. You’d asked for our input on a case concerning vehicle headlights?”

“Yes, Professor.”

“We have something for you.”

CHAPTER 14

Queens, New York City

Samantha Moore was raised in a two-story colonial frame house in Corona, about a 15-minute drive from where Ray Wyatt lived in Rego Park.

What are the odds she’d live so close? Wyatt thought.

At that moment, on some personal level, her case touched him because he was here, standing in front her home, with its gray-white brick, and its small front yard, bordered with ornate black fencing and neat flower beds.

He took photos and took stock.

Less than two days after meeting with Chase Lockner, Wyatt was now a full-time reporter for True Signal News. It felt strange to be working after the layoffs at First Press and the subsequent dark months. Now, standing here, on assignment, he realized that this is what he was meant to do. For the first time in a long time, he felt alive.

He needed this story.